Wednesday Evening Courses at St. Aidan’s

The Church at Corinth: Paul and the Shape of Christianity

January 20, 2010

So the question I am asking myself tonight is what have I gotten myself into?

I plan these Wednesday evening classes by thinking of a subject into which I would like to do a bit more digging, I put them on the calendar, and then I sit down to see what we will do when class begins. I have been reading all week and am more aware than usual that I could read for a year and still not have begun to scratch the surface of the subject. So, my plan today is to back up and try to say a few things about why I chose Corinthians and Paul.

First, I took a course on Corinthians in seminary 15 years ago and I had some books I wanted to read again.

Second, I am very much a modern in my approach to and understanding of scripture. On the clergy deployment form that sorts clergy by attitudes and preferences, there is a question in which we are asked to place our attitude on a scale that ranges between “regards the Bible literally” and “regards the Bible as am interpretation of God’s dealings with humanity.” The second one is still a bit traditional for me, but it will do. I do not feel compelled to take Christianity or its scriptures at face value, so I end up asking a lot of questions, sometimes about aspects of the faith that seem basic to it.

One of the questions asked in more modern times about Paul and his influence on Christianity has to do with whether Paul shaped the response to Jesus, which became the Christianity we are familiar with, into something Jesus never intended. The short version of that discussion notes that while Jesus spoke a lot about the kingdom of God, Paul spoke instead about Jesus. I wanted to spend some time with that question and thought revisiting Corinthians might be a way to go about it.

The other reason I thought of Corinthians is that one of the passages of scripture that has returned in my life in all its seasons is an appeal by Paul in Second Corinthians that seems, as I look at it now, to speak more in the voice attributed to Jesus in the question I just cited.

"From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." II Cor. 16-20

In their Introduction to The New Testament, Harcourt, 1982, Perrin and Duling describe Jesus this way. "Jesus of Nazareth was an itinerant, charismatic prophet of Aramaic-speaking, rural Galilee. He was a man who proclaimed to his people that the coming Kingdom of God was already present in his ministry of preaching and healing. He was crucified by the Romans as a potentially dangerous Zealot type revolutionary. Within a short time groups of itinerant preachers were scattered about villages of Syria-Palestine perpetuating his teaching and proclaiming that the end was near. Other were soon proclaiming in cities of the Roman Empire." 71-72

Soon people all over the Greco-Roman world were hearing that Jesus was the messiah and that the way to salvation was through Jesus. Jesus was the pivotal beginning of a new era in salvation history.

The gospels telling the story of Jesus were not written until at least forty years after he was gone. It is generally accepted these days that Mark’s gospel was written first and the Matthew and Luke both used Mark’s material and added other material, much of which they shared in common. It is assumed that they had another source of sayings of Jesus known simply as Q, for the German word for source. Matthew, Mark and Luke focused primarily on what Jesus said. It must be assumed that sayings of Jesus were considered important and were preserved in memory and in oral tradition and that the earliest written lists were preserved at least with some accuracy in the gospels. The earliest Christians held the sayings of Jesus in high esteem.

Paul, on the other hand, never quotes Jesus. Paul, who speaks of other teachers and of being one of the earliest followers of Jesus, who claims to have seen the risen Lord, would have been a part of that early tradition that valued Jesus’ words, but he does not quote Jesus in his letters which were written some 10-20 year before the first gospel. Instead, Paul speaks about Jesus, about the meaning of his death and resurrection, and about the meaning of our participation in the life of Jesus.

Somewhere between that wandering, charismatic prophet and the developed theological work that is the gospel of Luke, written around the year 90 ad. or the even more theologically nuanced gospel of John written a few years later, came Paul. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians were written around 55-57 ad. and in those letters we hear the Christianity of the later gospels being considered, thought through, shaped in ways that have been with us for almost two thousand years.

Some suggestions for reading Corinthians for this course.

Paul has taken a lot of flack for some of his views, especially on women’s roles and rights. Try to remember that he was writing in another era, and ask yourself how well your opinions on some issues of the day might hold up a thousand years down the road.

Try to focus on what Paul is saying about Jesus and ask yourself how he came to such conclusions as his masterful parallel between Adam in the garden of Eden and Jesus as the second Adam who redeems us all from The Fall by living his life well. If you get tired of hearing him go on about sexual morality try hearing the difference between his words about the situation in Corinth (which was a seaport and known widely as a brothel town) and his theological views on Jesus. Granted, they are often fit together, as in his discussion of the Lord’s Supper, but as the old saying goes, don’t worry about taking what you need and leaving the rest for another time. What doesn’t speak to you now may in another time or setting.

Note also that what we now have as I and II Corinthians is at least three letters, one of which makes reference to a fourth which we do not have. Some scholars think there were several more. Most seem to think that First Corinthians hold together and mentions the earlier letter. Second Corinthians speaks of a harsh letter, which may be the last four chapters of what is now Second corinthians. If that is true, then It might help to read chapters 10-13 before 1-9.

I invite you to read, Corinthians, and return with comments and questions which we will explore together. For those of you who are joining us on line, I will try to post comments from the session tonight.

John B